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OpinionComment
Neeta Lal
Neeta Lal

Opinion | Modi’s coronavirus response leaves India’s poor migrant workers to suffer

  • Precarious and crowded living conditions for those working in the informal economy make social distancing and handwashing unfeasible
  • The government’s response has been inadequate and largely focused on long-term economic uplift, leaving the poor cast adrift with no access to social protections

Reading Time:3 minutes
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Migrant workers desperate to return to their homes wait for transport to a railway station in Ahmedabad, India, on May 13. Photo: AP
Neeta Lal

Migrant labourers have fled India’s cities – the old and frail walking with sticks, couples struggling with infants and luggage, sobbing children trailing behind – trudging hundreds of kilometres back to their native villages.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a national lockdown to control the Covid-19 pandemic with four hours’ notice, confining 1.3 billion people to their homes. The pandemic exposed precarious living conditions for the nation’s poor in overcrowded shanties where social distancing and handwashing sound like a cruel joke.

More than 85 per cent of the country’s workforce toil in the informal economy, according to the International Labour Organisation. As many as a third of the population are internal migrants.

The move may have exacerbated Covid-19’s spread. Millions of poor migrants defied orders to stay indoors. With factories and businesses closed and no jobs, savings or social security to cushion them, this disempowered demographic left cities where they could not afford food.

Many migrants come from less-developed states to escape poverty or conflict to work as seasonal labour in urban factories. They build roads, malls and houses or pull rickshaws, clean homes and work as vendors. They contribute 50 per cent of India’s national income and constitute nearly 30 per cent of its human capital base, according to the government’s Economic Survey 2018-19.
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Experts fear the humanitarian crisis will push this segment further into penury, the ILO noted in a report on Covid-19 and migration, warning of “catastrophic consequences” for about 400 million people in India’s informal economy.

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